A former producer at British games studio DMA Design, now known as Rockstar North, recalls a period during the original Grand Theft Auto's development in which internal confidence in the title was low. Due to varying developmental issues, studio staff did not see much potential in the title and could not have predicted that Grand Theft Auto would become one of the most successful gaming franchises of all time.
Colin MacDonald is a game industry veteran who joined the team at DMA Design in 1997 during the months leading up to the release of Grand Theft Auto, though it was not yet known by that name. The earliest mainline entries in the Grand Theft Auto series were top-down experiences that had prototypical versions of the series' trademark open-world framing. This was years before the franchise would reach high levels of acclaim in the early 2000s with genre-defining titles like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto 3.
MacDonald would become a producer on Grand Theft Auto 2 and was able to witness the development of the series' earliest iterations. In a recent interview with BBC, MacDonald remarked that around halfway through development of the first game, an informal staff survey was conducted where members were asked which of the games in development at the time they thought would be most and least successful. Of the seven games in development, Grand Theft Auto was voted least likely to succeed, an ironic statement given that in the 25 years since the game's release, Grand Theft Auto's massive success has made it universally recognizable.
Colin MacDonald clarified that during development, the idea of what Grand Theft Auto was supposed to be was not yet clear. “It was also quite buggy - you couldn't play it for more than a couple of minutes without it crashing, so certainly at grassroots level, there wasn't a lot of confidence in it," the developer said during the interview. The game would receive a number of design overhauls during development with the introduction of series staples like police encounters, vehicle gameplay, and the first in the line of iconic Grand Theft Auto criminal characters. When the game launched in 1997, it would become the blueprint for the open-world sandbox Grand Theft Auto games that are still played and celebrated today.
Grand Theft Auto has earned the reputation of being the gold standard of the sandbox genre, but the earliest years of the series are notably humbler than the blockbuster productions of later titles. The amount of success that would spawn from the developers trying different ideas led to them striking gold. Had they given up on the project halfway, the landscape of modern gaming would have been a different story entirely. Grand Theft Auto is now a household name that has stood the test of time in gaming culture, and with Grand Theft Auto 6 confirmed to be in the works, it is a reputation that is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is currently in development.
Source: BBC